This is not polling

The Republicans must be spending money like water (thanks to the Citizens United decision). I got a phone call last night from someone who claimed to be doing a “poll” but it transparently wasn’t a poll at all, it was a ridiculous stealth advertisement.

The guy asked a few neutralish questions at first, then asked if, if I were voting today, I would vote for the Democrat candidate for the US senate or the Republican candidate ditto. “You mean Democratic?” I said. He repeated the question. I repeated my question. “Ma’am, I have to read the question exactly as it is.” Right; well only Republicans use “Democrat” as an adjective that way, and they do it to annoy, so we knew where we were. I simply gave him the straight party answer to every question, snickering when they got really obvious (“Do you think Patty Murray is a pork barrel candidate etc etc etc”).

We finished a long batch of questions, and he took a deep breath and said “Now I will ask you some questions about – ” and I interrupted to say this is taking too long, I don’t have all night, how many more questions do you have? He said it depends on how you answer.

Oh does it! So if I don’t give the answer you want, you’ll keep badgering me with loaded questions until I do? So that’s your game – you obnoxious time-wasting dishonest bastards. “How many more questions?” I said coldly. He repeated his schtick. “But you can tell me how many questions there are,” I said. “No Ma’am I can’t,” he said, so I said in an elevated tone, “Well than I can hang up,” and did so.

What an irritating intrusive bullying lying way to carry on. It’s something called The Torrance Company that does the “polling”; they “can’t” say who is funding it. No, I bet they “can’t.”

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19 Responses to “This is not polling”

Ophelia: You probably know the trick of dealing with phone ‘pollers’ etc, but perhaps others don’t.

You just say ‘please hold on while I get my husband/partner/Other, who makes all those sorts of decisions round here’. Then you put the phone down, go to another room and read a book, watch TV, write a song, or see if you can put a comment on a blog: say The Intersoction. Then return to the phone, and if the ‘poller’ is still there, say ‘I’m still looking. Your call is important to us. Please hold…’

Right; well only Republicans use “Democrat” as an adjective that way, and they do it to annoy, so we knew where we were

Sadly, I’m afraid the tendency is creeping into mainstream use. I’ve heard tv reporters say it (non-Fox tv reporters, I might add) and the other day I heard a Democrat (forget who — Harry Reid comes to mind, though) use it!

The very minute he would have employed the word “Ma’am, I would not have hung around the phone to call him “sir”. I abhor usage of this kind of formal language. It automatically gives the user a kind of power and can thus be very intimidating. You hear it a lot on American TV and in Great Britain. You were very patient with the caller, OB, to have held on for so long.

Oh I know lots of tricks for cold callers, but I decided in cold blood to do the poll so that I could skew the numbers away from the Palin side of the dial. And I of course don’t give them any personal information.

Yes, the usage has definitely crept into mainstream usage, especially (maddeningly) on the BBC; they invariably use “Democrat” as the adjective. It drives me nuts.

We get an awful lot of pollsters here. (I suspect that people with Hispanic surnames are a heavily targeted demographic.) I’ve taken to asking all telephone pollsters, whether they’re running a push poll or not, how much compensation I can expect for my time and opinions. After all, they’re getting paid to use up my time; in all fairness, I should get a chunk of that. This usually gets them to hang up on me, which gives me a warm glow inside.

I’m not sure what the Citizens United decision has to do with this. And I know a number of free speech people who are NOT Republicans who feel this decision was basically valid.

But this is not new, goes on all the time (including soooo many mailed ‘surveys’ from the Democrats and environmental and reproductive rights groups (probably because my name is on hot lists) of thinly veiled surveys which are simply in the end, requests for money.

A few years ago one from a Democratic senator (not even my state) talked about the evil influence of money, then offered me a chance to be on his ‘citizen roundtable’, all I had to do is donate $500.

A funny one though, I got a phone pseudo survey call from a local anti choice Republican. Just for the hell of it I went through all the questions instead of hanging up as I usually do, and in the end the pollster asked my religious affiliation. When I told her atheist, she replied that she was too (this was just a job to her)

The Citizens United decision has to do with the ability to spend money like water. I assume it’s expensive to hire thousands of push pollers. I don’t know anyone who thinks the decision was a good one.

I know it’s not new, I’ve just avoided them before. But pretend surveys that are really requests for money are not the same thing as pretend surveys that are really smear campaigns.

And broad fundraising actually is opposed to the evil influence of corporate money; that’s why it was good that Obama was able to raise huge sums from millions of people; it meant he didn’t need huge sums from corporations. Mind you, $500 is rather steep!

The Citizens United case was about the right to make your case to the American voter. It’s not buying votes. It’s not hidden cash delivered to politicians that is so common in DC–decisions get made behind the public’s back. But this is out in the open, visible. It can be challenged out in the open (unlike slush fund money). It’s always been ironic that newspapers can express political opinions, but those directly affected by the policies are forbidden.

This displays such contempt for the ‘stupid’ voter who apparently has no choice but to vote for the one that got the most support. People will either buy into your position or they won’t. If the voting public does not agree with you, no matter how much you spend, it won’t matter. All you have to do is look at the expensive ad campaigns for products that completely flopped to see that money does not mean success.

I do some freelance IT work, and my way of dealing with cold callers is to pretend to have them confused with a potential client. They get very confused when I tell them how much I will be charging per hour for talking to them on the phone, and asking who I need to invoice.

The connotations are not really formal in the deep South. You’re called ma’am by the time you’re old enough to see over the counter.

@ildi, No 11. Would the ‘Sir’ title be applicable to boys in the deep South from the time, they too, can see over the counter?

Incidentally, on a similar note, in 2009, the European Union issued guidance against the use of status-specific titles for women as the title for men, Mr., makes no reference to a man’s marital status. By the same token, the use of “Ma’am” for women over 40 and of “Miss” for women in their teens, twenties and thirties is seen as expressing the same sexism.

You’re NOT giving money to politicians. You are attempting to convince the American public of your position (whether it’s ‘right’ ‘wrong’ or ‘grey’). You are NOT getting them to act against the will of the voters (which bribery often does), youre trying to get the voters to see things your way. That is free speech, not bribery.

Free speech is an individual right, not a corporate right. That “you” is misleading. Citizens United is not about people attempting to convince the Murkan public of something, it’s about corporations using their disproportionate money to do so. That is not “free speech” as commonly understood. It is bought speech.

And broad fundraising actually is opposed to the evil influence of corporate money; that’s why it was good that Obama was able to raise huge sums from millions of people; it meant he didn’t need huge sums from corporations. Mind you, $500 is rather steep!

1) Obama got plenty of money from corporations.

2) The contributions from individuals in this case is not a good thing in my view. When a corporation throws $100,000 at a candidate, they’re expecting particular policies to be enacted. When 2000 people contribute $500 each, they’re just trying to keep the other guy out of office. If they both contribute, the politician gets $200,000, but still does exactly what the corporation wants because its relative contribution was larger and the policies requested are more sharply delineated.

It’s a game that individuals can’t win, which is why Citizen’s United is such a terrible decision (or one of the reasons).

jay@17:

The Citizens United case was about the right to make your case to the American voter. It’s not buying votes. … It’s always been ironic that newspapers can express political opinions, but those directly affected by the policies are forbidden.

Who is “you”? Private citizens have always had the right to buy air time to make their case to the American voter. All Citizens United does is say, “for the purpose of expressing political viewpoints, corporations are people too.” But that’s really, really stupid.

First of all, corporations don’t have political opinions. Even if they are directly affected by government policies, they cannot express opinions on that fact because they do not have opinions. They are less-than-inanimate. They are abstract. They are consensual hallucinations.

Executives and directors of corporations might have political opinions, but then, those people aren’t identical to the corporations. And they’ve always had the right, as private citizens, to buy airtime to try to convince people of the validity of their opinions. Not only that, if any private citizens had the money to be able to do this, corporate executives do.

Note also that if you agree that a corporation is a machine for generating profits, then an effective corporation will work to subvert, elide, or evade any government policies that hurt its bottom line. If you need to make corporations into human beings, then you also need to acknowledge that these are extremely antisocial human beings who do whatever they can to subvert the sort of legal restraints on their behavior that most real human beings take for granted. And they’ll do this without regard to any pain, death, injury, or externalized costs caused by their actions — externalities are money in the bank for corporation, as long as they’re picking the accountants.

Imagine a human being who spends millions of dollars campaigning to have rape decriminalized because of his “biological imperative for reproduction.” That’s basically what a corporation is. Just replace “reproduction” with “profit.”

This displays such contempt for the ‘stupid’ voter who apparently has no choice but to vote for the one that got the most support. People will either buy into your position or they won’t. If the voting public does not agree with you, no matter how much you spend, it won’t matter. All you have to do is look at the expensive ad campaigns for products that completely flopped to see that money does not mean success.

Your “they will or they won’t” argument is incoherent. If political ads don’t do anything, why is it such a big deal to you? Or why should anyone else care? Why should corporations want to spend money on ads that can’t possibly change anyone’s mind?

The question is not whether money=>success. The question is whether success=>money. Do products with expensive ad campaigns flop LESS OFTEN than products without expensive ad campaigns? If not, why does anyone bother with ads? Back to the incoherence of insisting that ads can’t possibly make a difference, but also that it’s so totally unfair not to let corporations buy those useless ads.

Advertisement does work. That’s the reason that corporations pour so much money into it. It funds almost all TV and radio and most internet content as well. And effective advertising does not work by making a rational argument, which is why I think there’s a lot of tension in the notion of a “political advertisement.”

Oh, and advertisement works as well as it does because a lot of people are really stupid. And many of those people vote. And yes, I do find them contemptible.

Never mind that, though. The important bit is that:

a) corporations are not human beings with opinions to express

b) corporations do not have a moral sense. If removing a particular regulation allows a corporation to make an extra $1,000,000 a year but in turn causes 10,000 birth defects, the corporation will not stop to ask whether it is right to do so. If an individual within the corporation does so, or tries to disclose the moral dilemma to the public, she will be removed from her position and probably be sued as well. In fact, since a consistent code of ethics pretty much inevitably eats into the bottom line, successful corporations will almost by definition not have consistent codes of ethics.

c) Regulations that protect the health and property of individuals as well as those preventing or regulating externalities inevitably negatively impact the bottom line. Because of this, corporations are inevitably going to oppose such regulations. If advocates for such regulations had the same deep pockets that corporations do, I might not think this was such a big deal, but inevitably corporations can make more noise than people, even really knowledgeable people. And from (b), we know corporations don’t have any problems lying about important issues of fact affecting the potential well-being of voters. Case in point: AGW as science vs. AGW as a political football.

Corporations are useful beasts, but they’re dangerous if not securely harnessed. And the harness gets a little looser every time a court decision or bit of legislation blurs the lines between rights of human persons and rights of incorporated persons.